Campaign Structure
Campaign Structure Even for an experienced GM, Pokémon Tabletop United presents a set of unique challenges. As in most tabletop RPGs, you tend to hit a stride after a certain point where you can either dedicate most of your time and preparation to a central plot, focus upon charactercentric plot arcs, or create a “sandbox” of highly varied activities for the players to get into. However, while in most RPGs you quickly grow out of the simple and repetitive quests used to introduce players into the world or the system, most Pokémon tabletop campaigns will retain a set of those basic activities throughout: catching Pokémon and challenging Gym Leaders. It can be a challenge to maintain an interesting variety in these activities as well as keeping the pacing of a campaign on the right track. A good guideline is to roughly split the campaign into two different phases: One in which there’s relative calm and the players are able to easily pursue Pokémon Gyms and other personal interests without interference, and one in which your larger plot intercedes and demands that action be taken on it. Early on in a campaign, you want to lean harder on the former phase, giving players plenty of time to explore on their own terms and develop their Pokémon teams. Later on, as players have formed solid teams and are reluctant to take on new members, you can phase out the idea of throwing in plentiful random encounters. As you introduce more of your central plot elements or character-centric plots, weave them in with the obligatory standard Trainer activities. A Gym Leader goes on hiatus until a threat to the town is dealt with. Perhaps they’re on call to deal with a criminal Team and have brought their Gym Trainers along to help too. Players stumble upon clues to the overall plot as they’re out catching Pokémon. Maybe they literally fall into some ancient ruins as they battle wild Pokémon over shaky ground, or maybe they might encounter an important NPC while exploring an uncharted route. Do this sort of weaving in the other direction as well. Perhaps the players need an expert on ancient civilizations to analyze an artifact they found, and their research leads them to an expert who happens to be a Gym Leader. The Gym Leader may even require the PCs to take on their challenge if they think they’re getting into too dangerous a situation and need to be tested to see if they’re truly ready yet. A search for a wanted Team Rocket member could lead the PCs to find a hideout holding abused Pokémon, some of which the PCs may adopt. This adds to their teams, furthers the plot at the same time, and gives them a personal reason to pursue the villains. Done well, this will ensure one phase of the campaign flows neatly into the next, always letting the players see when they’ll have an opportunity to pursue their own interests as well as explore the plot you’ve laid out for them. They shouldn’t ever feel like pursuing one has to come at the cost of the other. When it comes to concluding a campaign, there are two main ways you can approach this when running a traditional League-based game. You can either conclude the overall plot and tie up character arcs before using the Pokémon League tournament as an epilogue of sorts to the campaign, or you can leave a calm before the storm in the sessions leading up to the League tournament, then set in motion the climactic events of the plot after the Pokémon League concludes or even right as post- League celebrations are beginning. Either way, this ensures the League itself, if it is an important event for your game, is relatively isolated from other matters which might distract your players from it or keep them from fully enjoying it. Rules are meant to be broken, of course, and you can certainly use disruption of the Pokémon League as a major plot point in and of itself. The suggestions laid out here are just provide a solid foundation to a very traditional game, and you’ll likely want to deviate from this structure as you play and GM more campaigns of Pokémon Tabletop United. This is just the start of where you can go with the system. In a campaign without a focus on a Pokémon League or Contest Circuit or equivalent event, another well tested structure is to make the PCs part of an organization such as law enforcement, students at a Pokémon Trainer academy, or an exploration team and run mission-based sessions. Not only is this easy to organize, but it makes keeping the PCs well paid easy too! Creating Compelling Sessions Now you have an idea of how to handle the overall structure of a campaign, but you still have to keep each individual gaming session engaging for your players. Here are some easy guidelines to help with that. 1. Sessions should promote interactivity. This has multiple layers of meaning. First of all, it means your session should give your players plenty of room to make choices and influence the outcome of events. They shouldn’t feel like they’re simply sitting through a narrated series of events or reading a book. Second of all, the events in your session should promote interaction between the PCs. Tie together one character’s interests with another’s. Make tasks require Skills held by different PCs or the use of different Pokémon on their teams, and encourage them to talk through those tasks and turn them into RP opportunities. 2. Sessions should contain meaningful '''content. More than simply containing interactive choices, those choices should be meaningful and interesting. Combat is by its very nature interactive, but fighting bland swarms of wild Pokémon won’t give players a sense that they can make changes that matter in your world. This doesn’t necessarily require you to make worldspanning plots either. The simplest way to create meaningful choices for the PCs is to have them implicate personal goals and bring in character backgrounds. Of course, not every single session needs to be filled with this sort of content; it’s a good idea to have occasional fluffier sessions to give players a break. 3. Sessions should provide '''self-contained satisfaction while also contributing to a larger whole. Much like an episode of a good TV show, each segment of a campaign should be satisfying in and of itself while also adding to an overall plot. It’s no good to drop a bunch of clues and hints about later plot developments but leave players feeling like they didn’t actually do much or accomplish anything in the session, and it’s no better to create magnificently crafted sessions after sessions if all of them are completely episodic and unrelated to each other, with no overarching stories or character arcs. This is another rule that can be bent a little, in the sense that it’s okay to have occasional standalone sessions that aren’t tied to anything else in particular but are a lot of fun in themselves. Usually, these are sillier off the wall sessions such as bug catching competitions, whacky Contests, and other fun minigame activities. Pre-Campaign Preparations Let’s start with some prep work you should do at the beginning of a campaign, before you even run the first session. Doing this very soon after the first session is okay as well, but it can be time-consuming and cut into your time to prepare your next few sessions. Create a small dossier on each PC. Don’t make it too long; you have to do about 4 or 5 of these in a standard campaign, after all. What should you include in this dossier? Talk to your players about how they want their PCs to develop. Which parts of their character backgrounds are most important to them? What are their characters’ main skills and interests? Do they have developed goals from the outset, or will they pick those up as the game goes on? Do your players have any outof- character desires for the game? For example, if they’d like to have the party visit a particular type of locale sometime or if they want their character to get into trouble and shenanigans often. If you’re taking down wishlists, put them in the dossier as well. These will be your reference documents for what kind of material to include in sessions when you’re stumped for ideas. Be especially careful at this stage to make sure you have ideas in mind for how to hook in PCs who have more mundane or obscure Skill choices. Break In Case of PC Choices It’s inevitable. You will have your plans dashed by the players making decisions you didn’t realize were even in the realm of possibility for them. Plan for a few sessions in a new city, and the PCs will instead latch onto the merchant NPC passing through town who makes an off-handed remark about heading into the desert, and the next thing you know they’ve declared themselves his bodyguards and are dead set on outfitting themselves in archeology gear and searching for ancient Unown ruins and fossils for the next couple of sessions. Running The Game 456 Don’t fret. This is a trial by fire that all GMs go through, and you’ll emerge from it as a stronger and wiser GM. Later in this chapter, you’ll see guides on quickly building NPCs and fast Pokémon statting for encounters, which can help you improvise in these situations. However, the best way to prepare for this eventuality is to create a toolkit of modular adventures that can be sprinkled through new locations as you need them. It takes a lot of initial time investment to make these, but when you’re done, you can shove ‘em in a box, slap a “Break In Case of PC Choices” label on the top, and sit them on your desk feeling much less stressed out about these potential situations. This works hand-in-hand with the dossiers you’ve created on your PCs before the start of the campaign. Here are some examples of how to put this into practice: Campaign Prep Examples First, let’s establish two characters for a hypothetical GM to create dossiers and run sessions for. Marty is a Researcher focusing on botany and herbs. He mainly specializes in Survival and General Education, with a bit of dabbling in other Education Skills such as Technology. He also has a magnetic personality and the Charm Skill to match. Marty’s player hasn’t really thought much yet about his in-character goals, but he knows that he wants to capture Pokémon like Sneasel and Swinub and puts them on a wishlist for his GM. Abigail is a quiet and introspective Telepath. Despite her mind reading abilities, she isn’t great with people and is lacking in Skills such as Charm and Guile. However, she has great Body Skills such as Acrobatics and Athletics, along with the Focus needed for her telepathic powers. Her major in-character motivation is to uncover the secret behind a mysterious bombing at a Silph Co. office building that took her parents’ lives, but out-ofcharacter, Abigail’s player wants the adventure to lead to ancient ruins somewhere. The GM begins thinking on a number of scenarios he can put in his back pocket for sessions where he’s caught off guard and needs content. First, he thinks about his cities. He’s left the specific institutions and attractions of each city deliberately vague aside from a few major defining characteristic of each city, leaving him free to shuffle plot points around. He comes up with a group of former Silph employee NPCs who knew Abigail’s parents and might be able to help her discover who was behind the bombing. They were nearly caught in the explosion as well though, and they’re reluctant to talk about what happened. The GM figures he can use this to have either Abigail make use of her Telepathy, or have Marty assist her with his charming personality. Obviously, with an ominous terrorist attack in one of his PCs’ backstories, the GM is going to need to work in some sort of criminal Team angle into his campaign, so he thinks of ways he can get Marty’s player invested in this sort of plotline as well. He constructs a scenario about a few high profile murders carried out by Team Verdance, a group of ecological terrorists, using poisons harvested from various Grass Type Pokémon such as Vileplume, Parasect, and Amoonguss – perfect for Marty’s botany specialty. For the victims, he creates NPCs who are close to acquaintances or friends of both Marty and Abigail, to give them a way into the scenario and a reason to investigate. Even with these two scenarios on hand, the GM feels like he’d be more comfortable if he had a few more session ideas he could throw at his players if they make their way to a town where he has little prepared. Knowing that Marty will find himself poking around herb and berry shops often, he maps out an underground Team Verdance hideout underneath an herb shop. He’s not sure exactly how the PCs will stumble upon it, but he’s confident that if he has the base prepared, he can improvise a way to rope the PCs into exploring it if he hits a slow session. Then, realizing that he’s been leaning pretty heavily on the criminal team aspect of things, he decides to prepare something lighter and comes up with a celebratory festival he can drop into a town the PCs are visiting. Among the attractions will be Pokémon Contests, a small amateurs’ battling tournament, and other small minigames – with prizes such as rare herbs and berries, relics from ancient civilizations, and other items he knows the players will have an interest in. Done with his “just in case” session ideas for the cities, the GM turns to filling the wilds with adventure seeds, Running The Game 457 which is a bit trickier due to the variance in terrains and environments the players will encounter. He needs something that’s terrain-agnostic to throw at his PCs. The GM isn’t too worried about preparing encounters for capturing Pokémon – he’s done some rough planning for what kinds of species go where, and he’s sure he can stat them up quickly as need be. However, he does need some events on the road that the PCs can follow up on as adventure seeds. After some writing, he comes up with a few scenarios that fit multiple different terrains – collapsed bridges that have stopped other traveling Trainers, Pokémon transport vehicles that have crashed and lead to the Pokémon inside escaping, Pokémon driven feral by questionable scientific experiments, etc. He ties some of the NPCs involved in these scenarios to the Team Verdance plotline, some of them to Marty’s past and to the research lab he was a part of, and some to various other ideas the GM has had for potential plots, such as a small silly cult worshipping the Unown and a group of researchers searching for Legendary Pokémon. However, after comparing his notes for his cities and for the wilderness, he concludes that his city-centric adventures are a lot more cohesive and focused due to their ties to the Team Verdance plotline. He decides to create something equivalent for the wilds and realizes he’s yet to hit on either Abigail’s player’s desire to find ancient ruins and Marty’s player’s wishlist much. Eventually, he comes up with the idea that an ancient civilization once created a floating city similar to the Sword of the Vale in the Pokémon Black and White movies. However, during a terrible war, the city was destroyed and its parts scattered all over the region. Some of these parts are fragments of wondrous and powerful ancient artifacts, making them valuable and sought after prizes. To rope the PCs into this hunt, the GM decides he’ll drop some hints about Silph Co. researching these artifacts shortly before the bombing that killed Abigail’s parents, and for Marty, he has one of the young researcher’s mentors who taught him about botany approach him with his discovery of a mysterious plant that was icy cold and exuded a freezing aura around it – found in the ruins of one particularly intact part of the ancient city. Eventually, Abigail and Marty should find enough hints through the hunt for artifacts to lead them to a set of ruins high up in the snowy mountains – perfect for Marty to catch a Sneasel or Swinub and also a way to satisfy Abigail’s player’s curiosity about ancient ruins. Satisfied with his emergency box of session ideas, the GM is confident going into the start of his campaign. Unfortunately, however, not everything goes perfectly as planned. It turns out the way he wrote the role of the ex-Silph NPCs, it was too easy for Abigail to simply read their minds and get whatever information she needed, and Marty’s player consistently felt left out of sessions involving those NPCs. Luckily, our GM is familiar with this issue, that it is much easier to give out plot hooks to those with supernatural powers and thus necessary to think carefully about making sure everyone is equally involved, whether they are normal humans or gifted with supernatural talents. It’s an easy change for him – he has the NPCs become a bit more willing to give out information, but they are difficult to convince to come along to help investigate old shut down Silph labs and other areas of interest without Marty’s smooth talking. Once in those areas, Abigail’s athleticism helps everyone stay safe and access hard to reach areas while Marty continues to contribute with his knowledge of technology. In the end, the players get to experience a wonderful campaign, and the GM has fun as well with relatively worry-free GMing due to the preparation they did before the campaign began.